Make Health Not Weight Loss Your Goal

July 7, 2018

Hello lovelies

Today, I have been joined by a guest blogger the lovely Anna Jones from Time to Sort It to talk about body image and creating healthy behaviours for our health and wellbeing from a different perspective.

Make Health Not Weight Loss Your Goal

Not a day goes by without us hearing some discussion in the media about how to tackle ‘obesity’, and which are the best diets to follow for weight loss.

Well wake up Western World! There are thousands of diets out there all claiming to be ‘the one’ and yet still we are fat!

World wide ‘obesity’ has tripled since 1975. This coincides with the diet industry really taking off. Weight Watchers was created in the USA in the 1960s by Jean Nidetch and was sold to Heinz in 1978. The diet industry has since grown exponentially, producing revenue of £2 billion in the UK and over $60 billion in the USA.

Is it merely a coincidence that as the diet industry has grown, so have the numbers of people inhabiting larger bodies?

I think not. And Beth Rosen, MS, Registered dietician agrees:

“When we restrict our food in an attempt to lose weight, our bodies don’t appreciate it and work to get back to homeostasis. To do this, our bodies produce a hormone that makes us obsess over food and signal hunger in an effort to combat our weight loss tactics. Once we give in to our body’s fight, our bodies tend to gain the weight we lost, plus a little extra. That extra weight is an “insurance policy,” in the event of a subsequent diet. This vicious cycle of dieting causes our body to increase our set point, thus, the more we diet, the more we weigh over time. Therefore, ironically, the act of dieting sabotages our weight loss goals.’

And yet still we blame ourselves and not the diets for our inability to sustain long term weight loss.

What I’m about to say next won’t be anything that most fatter people don’t already know.

No one enjoys being larger of size.

How could we? Especially when in the society in which we live, being fat is pretty much the worst thing you can be?

How much easier would our lives be if we were slim?

If we matched up to the current beauty ideals of the western world?

How much less self-loathing would there be if we didn’t feel like failures every time we compared ourselves to the images of slender females which we are confronted with each day?

How much easier to not have to worry about the judgement of others.

Even when we are not judged for how we look, we are vilified for not taking care of our health.

We are constantly told that being overweight is unhealthy, despite evidence that this is not true.

In the book Body Respect, Linda Bacon PHD and Lucy Aphromor, PHD, RD explain and demonstrate that there is a lot of misinformation regarding the link between ‘obesity’ and health. They point out that:

‘The renowned Cooper Institute in Dallas, which focuses on preventing disease, has been gathering data in large groups of patients. It’s follow up has shown that the death rate for women and men who are thin but unfit is at least twice as high as for their fatter counterparts (those in the ‘obese’ category) who are fit’

It seems that it is our behaviours that impact our health not our size.

Yet the media still chooses to spread the unfounded rumour that people in larger bodies are a burden on the health service.

What hurts me personally the most, is the inference that we bring it on ourselves! The assumption that we haven’t tried to lose weight or that we have not tried hard enough.

NOT TRUE!

We have tried! Believe me, we have tried!

Many of us have spent years trying.

We have invested huge amounts in trying to shrink our bodies; we’ve invested money, time, headspace. We’ve invested big chunks of our lives in the pursuit of the thin ideal.

The evidence of just how long and hard we have tried is reflected in the fact that we have helped to create a multibillion-dollar weight loss industry!

And yet still we are ‘overweight’.

And the weight loss industry continues to reap the rewards of our struggles.

So next time you look at a person and begin to make assumptions about their health based on their size, please think again.

And if you yourself are in a larger body, do yourself a favour and ditch weight loss as your goal; it creates a lot of stress and the stats are hugely stacked against you achieving long term success! Aim for healthy behaviours instead!

If you would like to follow Anna, or would like any further information on this subject you contact Anna via the link to her website below or connect with her via Facebook using the link below.

More about Anna

After having spent 40 years fixated on losing weight and 15 years working in the diet industry, Anna finally learnt to accept her own body with all it’s perfect imperfections. She recreated her own relationship with food and is now a born again anti-diet preacher

She LOVES helping long term serial dieters finally make friends with their bodies and make peace with food so they can enjoy a guilt free, happy life.

ABOUT CHERYL

Welcome to the Power of 3 Health and Wellbeing;
I am Cheryl and this is my personal lifestyle blog;
In this space I will write about my health and wellbeing story. Whilst sharing the physical and mindset aspects along the way. I hope that my experiences will help and inspire you on your journey;
I hope you enjoy reading it.

Recent posts

About Cheryl

Welcome to the Power of 3 Health and Wellbeing;
I am Cheryl and this is my personal lifestyle blog;
In this space I will write about my health and wellbeing story. Whilst sharing the physical and mindset aspects along the way. I hope that my experiences will help and inspire you on your journey;
I hope you enjoy reading it.